


the surprise of our similarities

by ideare



Category: Pacific Rim (Movies)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Gen, Minor Violence, Slice of Life, Snapshots
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-10-05
Updated: 2018-10-19
Packaged: 2019-07-25 19:25:11
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 4
Words: 2,246
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16204079
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ideare/pseuds/ideare
Summary: "[...] the surprise of our similarities. It brings us back to the obscure sense that we are all members of a far-flung family, sharing feelings both unique to us and oddly universal."Sometimes, they need to remind themselves that despite the different paths they took to  get here — they're here now. So, they might as well make the most out of their time together and actually do something that could change the world.





	1. 2027

**Author's Note:**

  * For [smaragdbird](https://archiveofourown.org/users/smaragdbird/gifts).



> title and summary quote comes from _A Time of New Dreams_ by Ben Okri.
> 
> song companion: [_Son of Placenta Previa_](https://youtu.be/DDkN7xV3Xe4) by Cliff Martinez.

_Friday 12th February 2027._

Sleep presses in on her eyes, tight and insistent, and she struggles to stay awake as she walks. The cold bites into her skin, but every nibble numbs her and she pushes onward.

There is a point that she is trying to make here, but when every crease of her clothes is a knife slash against her skin, she's not so sure that points are things she should be creating.

Russia is freezing in the winter; even the ground shrugs into itself in this weather. She'd be forgiven for wishing she'd brought gloves. Her hands are red and raw, almost burning in their pain. But never mind that now — there is no room for regrets in place where permanence is fleeting.

/

On some occasions: if she squints long enough into a crowd, the shadows of her family eclipse all the pain their absence has wrought. If she sips her water slow enough, the taste of chocolate milkshake rolls across her tongue, washing away the fact that she hasn't eaten any real food in the past two days. If she walks fast enough, she can dive into the crafted joy of a passing family, even as she struggles to not let the wave of her own past (and potential) tragedy drown her. 

With enough practice, she can fall asleep anywhere and still be alert enough of her surroundings to stay safe. 

It is amazing what people will abandon if they feel like they're being left behind. And it is amusing to see what she can create when she has literally nothing else to use. The most innocuous, throw-away sentence leaves her feeling inspired for days, weeks if the greed of her hunger doesn't starve her creativity. 

/

The flash of the camera bulbs are blinding in this dim arena. The crowd are packed tightly together, a living, breathing, colourful pulse all vying for that perfect view. The heat generating in this room gets trapped in his polyester blazer, making him sweat. The starched collar of his dress shirt digs into the back of his neck, leaving the nape of his freshly cut hair raw from the friction. Sweat rolls down behind his ear, curving in a gentle slope to the nape of his neck as he turns his head for a better photo angle. It stings, but he barely even grimaces. He can feel the blisters forming on the back of his heels as he shuffles to realign himself into another family pose. 

It's only been seventeen minutes, and his parents haven't even started their talk yet, haven't even greeted the crowd. Already he can feel his patience waning, can feel the ache in his jaw as his smile tenses on his face. His upper thigh itches, but it is too close to his crotch for it to be acceptable for him to scratch it on camera. His parents would probably only be annoyed for an hour, off-camera, but the suburb where they've made their new home is so mind-numbingly mundane that it would be all anyone there would talk about for the next month. 

He shifts again; the whole family shuffles to provide yet another photo-ready angle as a camera bulb blows in the intensity of its own flash.

His breath hitches and his heart-rate spikes a little as he attempts to wiggle his toes in his shoes. His feet feel trapped, and he can't help but think about the unnatural way his feet have been confined into these well-polished shoes. He tries to spread his toes out, but the restricted space doesn't allow for much movement.


	2. 2037

#

_Saturday 13th March 2037._

She cuts the dark ends of her hair off, so only the sun-bleached blonde remains. She lets go of each handful, and the strands cascade around her like inappropriate rain. A breeze stirs the air as she's letting go of the last pieces of her formerly shoulder-length hair, making it so she has to squint her eyes shut so the pieces don't jeopardize her vision as they tickle past her forehead, her eyelids, the bridge of her nose. (It's not perfect as it is, but she can't afford glasses if it becomes worse. And what's a slight scowl as she strains to see if it adds to her character?)

"Vik." She tries the name out loud for the first time, puckering her lips in a frown like she's tasting it for the first time. It doesn't feel like hers yet; the name is a stranger mistaken for a friend that she's trying to call over. 

She tries again — "Vik." This time she puts it on like armour, determined to shield herself against the detection of her past. 

A name is a powerful thing, and no one should be privy to hers unless she wills it to them. Right now, there is no one she would gift that pleasure to.

She kicks at the strands of her circling her, mixing them into the piles of leaves and dirty snow at her feet. Like her name, she knows too well how easy it is for a stranger to stumble across the pile and wield her hair as a weapon against her. Her grandmother may have lied to her about a lot of things, but she never joked about safety.

"Vik." She whispers it into the air and lets the wind blow it back to her. She breathes it in.

/

She rubs hard at the back of her neck and behind her ears, the cold rainwater splashing against her face and dripping down her neck and arms in a track of goosebumps, running off the tips of her elbows. It's a good thing she plans on wearing a coat tonight; there's no way her proposal would be accepted tonight if she came there looking like the sweaty, underprepared street kid she tries so effortlessly to portray the rest of the time she's out in public. Appearance is key tonight. No one would want to help you steal something if they thought you would be the one to get them caught.

When she's done washing, she picks the grime out from under her finger nails, flicking it carelessly out the window above her.

Her Jaeger is almost complete. There are just a few more parts she needs to collect before it will be ready to go online. And then the best part of her life will begin. She can already see the headlines about the girl-genius who created a single-neural pathway running Jaeger, small enough to pilot safely with one person without crushing their brain. She can practically see the after-image of the flashing cameras as she closes her eyes to fully immerse herself in her future.

"Amara!"

The echo of her name along the exposed metalwork of the abandoned warehouse just adds to the grandeur. 

/

There is only so much he can do: he has tried being patient; he has tried being understanding. He has even had multiple people explain it to him in different languages and different media forms, but he still can't accept that being a hero is actually something that people his age should be striving towards. What glory is there in being a hero in a peaceful world? What satisfaction is there in saving people that have inflicted this condemnation onto themselves? Why bother if all you get for your efforts is dead and a hologram of yourself on a wall locked away for only specific people to see? He wouldn't even be able to have his name marked below him, to immortalize him to future generations: Ou-Yang Jinhai. 

Where is the logic in being a silent hero with no one to save?

He is over this whole hero thing and he has been for a long time now. The world and space he occupies is too small for him to start stressing on something of so much magnitude. He might still have his whole life ahead of him if he isn't trying to follow in his parents' footsteps. (And he has long since realised that even their shoes are too small to fill with any satisfaction.)

There has to be something he can do with his life that doesn't mean he has to die to be successful.


	3. 2044

#

_Sunday 17th April 2044._

They meet at the brink of true adulthood, just as they are on the cusp of becoming 'old' by society's standards. When they would technically have been old enough to train children in the art of war and dying for your friends, your country, your planet. They are at that age where all the micro-expectations of society have culminated into them becoming an insecure, over-intelligent, underpaid, overworked, high-functioning member of society. A group of people who are susceptible to manipulation, who have just enough doubt in their abilities that society can shape them into becoming whoever those in charge deem necessary to create. 

It is almost scary how easy it is to make them want to _change_ , to _improve_ , to become better people — not for the sake of society, but for 'themselves'.

#

_Monday 25th April 2044._

The noise of the canteen is overwhelming. In fact, the whole space of a Shatterdome is one that defies logic. Vik struggles to get her head around the enormity of everything. From one room to the next, she feels like Alice struggling to fit in to a world where everything is at once too big and too small. There is no happy medium. Walking between the hanger bays for the Jaegers, she feels the type of tiny that she had only heard people describe, but never actually felt before. 

The feeling cloaks her, making its presence felt even in the dorms, where she feels too big for the space — like not even the universe can contain her in all her potential.

/

The new Pan Pacific Defense Corps' idea of shaping the restless, uninspired adults of her generation into a brutal, no-questions-asked, no-holds-barred army to defend the world was genius. Amara has to admit that she's impressed. They were just angry enough, just restless enough, just insecure enough to be unstoppable, both in design and execution of new ideas and techniques that would have had even their most recent predecessors frowning at their recklessness. 

Who knew that a generation of children raised by absent parents would create a world with more make-shift families of more self-destructive, fatalistic, and innovative adults?

/

Whether he is in his PT gear, or decked out in his Jaeger control prototype, Jinhai still isn't convinced that being a hero is worth anything. He still doesn't see the point of funnelling money into a system that hasn't been needed in over two decades. There are better things the combined world governments could do than plan for a war that has been long since over. Reconstruction still needed to be done in the vast majority of the world. Kaiju bodies that still litter and pollute more run-down neighbourhoods have yet to be cleared away and adequately disposed. There are even still problems like homelessness and starvation that are occurring every minute somewhere on earth. Problems that should have been eradicated decades ago.

 _Maybe_ the friends they made in basic training were worth it. But what was the point of friends if you had to mould them into what they should already be (on principle)? What was the point of friends if you had nothing in common? He might eat lunch with them, but he's still not sure if he would die for them.


	4. 2045

#

_Tuesday 2nd May 2045._

There is rarely to be found, the fast bond of people with a shared enemy. It is a bond that can outlast and strengthen even the most adverse of personalities.

#

_Wednesday 10th May 2045._

It must be a safety measure: pulling them away from the only life they have ever known, sheltering them away from civilization, and then thrusting them into stardom via remote broadcasting, all without actually allowing them to meet the people whose lives and freedom they are allegedly saving. How else would the people in charge be able to make plans that result in deciding that whole towns are insufficient enough to be left for the Kaiju, while others are too valuable to ever be without the constant protection of Jaeger on standby?

The trio sit in the canteen, quiet and sombre as they listen to the sounds of a whole town being ravaged by three Kaijus as it is broadcast by LOCCENT within the entire Shatterdome. Apparently, some genius had discovered that people's gratitude towards the PPDC was waning, and as a result, so were their donations. So, in order to entice them into continually funding the Jaeger Pilot Program — indefinitely — the combined world governments had decided to let the destruction of towns be broadcast globally. It was a rude reminder that no one was truly safe.

Something in Jinhai snaps as soon as the broadcast ends. It's not an obvious thing — it's the glint in his eye and the slight press of his lips as his jaw tightens — but after months of drifting together, it's enough to alert both Amara and Vik. All three of them straighten up as Jinhai's determination washes over them, replacing any misgivings that the edge of his plans might have sparked within them previously. 

Maybe 'hero' wouldn't quite be the word he would use — he really can't wrap his head around the necessity of a government-approved lapdog — but 'vigilante' has a nice ring to it.


End file.
